Presidential Poetics

Gun Safety in America

  Guns in America: A Diagnosis by Andrew Small

I wanted to share this compilation of information before Vice President Biden's findings are released next week. I think we should prepare the national debate by looking at what America's gun safety problem looks like.

A few thoughts:

• Our simplistic, ideological and largely regional attempts at addressing gun safety have failed the goal of creating comprehensive policy that respects everyone's right to life and liberty.
• The variety of state laws in existence have further complicated an effort to effectively provide for both public safety and respecting Second Amendment rights. Different state laws have created interstate commerce problems that make both gun bans and unlimited gun rights stand in the way of keeping guns out of the hands those who use them for wrong-doing. In fact, the difference in state laws appears to have created a premium on illegal guns in states with gun bans that are easier to obtain in lax guns states.
  
  
  The answer isn't no guns or more guns; it's smart policy to protect everyone. Compared to other peaceful industrialized countries, Mexico's gun ban and America's gun freedom embody a paradox, ranking first and second in the gun homicide category with very different gun laws; the data seems to suggest that neither ideology holistically prevents gun violence. Their shared border confounds the problem. Does Mexico have more gun violence because legal guns are banned? Does America's high availability of guns make it impossible for Mexico to have a controlled experiment in eliminating guns? Apply this same logic to the interstate problem of different gun laws for different states and you find that many gun ban states successfully reduce violence in their states from guns bought in their state but guns bought from other states seem to draw into states with gun bans. It's difficult to determine whose policy is to blame but clearly there is a question of interstate problems that prevent either from properly enacting their laws as they were intended.
• My largest frustration is that we need national gun control that effectively approaches this problem as a right that needs public safety responsibilities. The Constitutional right to bear arms should be "well-regulated" as the Second Amendment asks for a militia for the common good. Reactionary attempts to fix the issue with one or two gun laws won't solve our entire gun problem but a careful construction of safety infrastructure could bring down gun deaths.
  
  
  
  Assault weapons bans might help mitigate mass shootings but most gun deaths actually occur with handguns. Universal disarmament is impossible, improbable and insane when illegal sales can never be entirely stopped. School safety is a good job for police, not a rag tag militia. Mental health precautions should be clearly and sensitively addressed in the medical profession but not subject to arbitrary political powers.It seems as though the NRA's mission is more about boosting gun sales by scaring their members about gun bans and earning sales for their "corporate partners" than performing the goal of teaching gun safety. The original purpose for the organization was as a marksmanship organization after the Civil War to maintain former Union soldiers' abilities should a rebellion occur again. Now the NRA appears to be a confederacy of dunces demanding nothing but the freedom to make us all beholden to Gun Power as Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently explains in The Atlantic. 
  
  
  Blaming culture is a cheap escape from addressing how and why guns get in the hands of criminals, especially when it appears as though gun manufacturers do not take preventing straw purchases seriously as they continue to find a minority of dealers who will turn a blind eye to schemes to get criminals guns. The gun lobby has gone as far as to get Congress to pass full immunity from prosecution for gun manufacturers and dealers during the Bush Administration. Responsible gun sellers have no mechanism for reporting suspicions, irresponsible dealers have no mechanism for accountability. The NRAs absolutism isn't about protecting law abiding gun owners' rights, it's about selling more guns whether they are to good guys or bad guys.
  
  
  Legal gun owners mostly are not the problem but the Second Amendment's sacrosanctity has made stopping illegal guns impossible for the underfunded ATF, which has limited resources to track guns. Most illegal guns were bought legally at some point and sold through "straw purchasers" in untracked private sales. Background checks are slow and ineffective almost by NRA design. We should have some sort of internet national database to check criminal histories/mental  health issues and report stolen/lost guns instantly. We have the means but the gun lobby refuses to implement it. A national database of guns isn't Hitler's tool to tyranny but a national database of scapegoats and those he deemed "inferior" that whom should be locked up would have been his dictatorial delight.

I find it incredibly disturbing that those who advocate no gun control at all claim to be fighting tyranny while demanding all other rights give way to guns that could eventually empower them as despots in their dystopian vision.

We can regulate speech to protect our children from words/images/violent video games. We can regulate religion to prevent cults and immorality.  We can regulate assembly to protect our politicians, make traffic flow better or pepper-spray stinky hippies. We can regulate petitions to keep the peace and propagandize patriotism. We've adjusted our interpretation of nearly every amendment to the original Bill of Rights under the rationalization of providing for the public safety. They're right. None of those rights are absolute because they can infringe upon some else's rights. But a gun could never take away our right to life, liberty, or property, could it now?

I want to leave with everyone the idea that we need to have perspective about what assumptions we draw about this issue from the information we seek. Our society itself is not nearly as violent as it once was despite the implication that somehow culture or mental illness has increased it. What we face is an effort to catch up with our technology and learn how to effectively control its negative effects. This has always been a challenge. If you look at the casualties of the Civil War, its sheer brutality stems largely from a lack of knowledge of how to manage new weaponry, which democratized violence, and new media, which democratized propaganda.

Our society is less violent per capita than the Civil War and less violent per capita than it was in the 1970s but we have nearly an equal number of individuals dying from gun related deaths as in the mid-to-late 1970s. One of the problems with the way we handle violence in a so much larger society is by detaching ourselves from others' plights through class/race/region which Slate writer Emily Bazelon suggests made the Newtown massacre different for many of us. We can't use our emotional detachment and population to neglect as a society that these are still individual lives lost rather than aggregate data.

We face two major problems in the gun debate: a failure to handle the advances in technology, created to destroy, and a failure to handle all of these human losses through our advances in technology, created to inform. We must not face these problems with indifference if we want to make a difference.

The Other Pardoned Bird

What They Ordered Here: McLincoln

McLincoln? AbraHam Burger?

The Better-Burg Address

It was over two hours long!

National Geo-Gaffe-phic

Mitt's "Easy" Button

Battle-mitt

Suddenly, Mitt Romney realized that his strategy of taking all possible positions might backfire.

Romnixote

Barry Obama and the Socialist's Stone

Mitt Romney and the Deathly Shallows

The Spirit of Music: Nietzsche's Irresolvable Conflict of Apollonian and Dionysian Art

"We have art to save ourselves from the truth."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Abstract: Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy through the Spirit of Music outlines the relationship between the “image-maker or sculptor” art of Apollo and “imageless art of music” of Dionysus, both gods of music. Nietzsche argues that both of these gods represent forces in nature that are in open conflict in Greek Tragedy both energizing the art form and leading to its destruction. Nietzsche explains how this irresolvable conflict creates a void that gives way to Socratic aestheticism.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche criticizes classicist nostalgia for Greek culture, stating, "Greek tragedy perished differently from all the other, older sister-arts: it died by suicide, as a result of the irresolvable conflict, which is to say tragically."¹ He argues that Greek tragedy is not simply in perfect harmony with the "unity of man with nature" as described by Schiller as "naive."² Nietzsche states that the Greeks' view of the "image-maker or sculptor and the imageless art of music" is reflected by their respective deities of art, Apollo and Dionysus.³ He contends that the duality of these drives works in open conflict to produce Greek tragedy and the spirit of music. Nietzsche argues the conflict causes Greek tragedy to destroy itself, giving way to the reflection and reason for which the Enlightenment reveres the Greeks as "noble, simple, elegant and grandiose!”⁴

Reality and Illusion: Conflict of the Will
Nietzsche argues the view of Greek art as "naive" exemplifies the prevalence of the Apollonian's dominance before tragedy. The Apollonian dream gave meaning and significance to the lives of the Greeks with illusion. Tragedy gives them the ability to imagine themselves as "restored natural geniuses."⁵ Nietzsche theorizes that the chorus in tragedy was originally always satyrs, or goat-men. Through this dream, "the illusion of culture was wiped away by the primordial image of man," linking the Apollonian dream with Dionysian instincts.⁶The Apollonian dream is an illusion of individualism, capable of "greatness, always of significance." The Dionysian is an intoxication and a re-immersion into a common organic whole. The Dionysian impulse leads to the collapse of the Apollonian principium individuationis, joining the group's affirmation of the meaning of their existence.⁷

Martha Nussbaum argues that "the energies that Nietzsche associates with Dionysus reveal to the spectator" cause individuals to forget themselves "through a process of sympathetic identification with the hero - the 'horror or absurdity of existence.' For the hero embodies in his person the inexorable clash between human aspirations and their natural/divine limits: his demand for justice in an unjust universe entails terrible suffering.⁸ Greek tragedy energized the Dionysian celebration of the reality of pleasure and pain in human existence and the Apollonian illusion provided a protective spirit. Together, the forces of the two gods form the spirit of music, which is "a direct copy of the Will itself."⁹A balance between the two artistic drives of nature create "artistic jubilee" and "the destruction of the principle of individuation" becomes an "artistic phenomenon."¹⁰ However, Nietzsche argues that the Greeks' human condition is anything but simple optimism. Becoming entirely absorbed in either force leads to the destruction of the other, bringing about tragedy's death.

Schopenhauerian Pessimism: The Struggle Between Will and Representation
Martha Nussbaum argues that Schopenhauer's concept of the will is not "intelligent" because it "exercises neither perception nor thought." The will is not "artistic: because it neither "makes things up nor transforms itself." The will is not "aware of itself as being at all or other beings as the distinct beings they are."¹¹Schopenhauer denounces willing as suffering and considers art a way to "lose ourselves" in the object.¹² Nussbaum argues that "Tragedy, in Schopenhauer's view, is an especially valuable art form because, in addition to nourishing the aesthetic attitude, as do all forms of art, it reminds us, by its content, of the many motives we have for turning toward art, and away from the will."¹³ Nussbaum argues that "Schopenhauerian pessimism" concludes that "nature as a whole" is "infected" with "guilt" and "delusions" and that the "experience of spectatorship" exemplifies detachment from will that gives us "new motives to reject and blame life as both evil and false."¹⁴

Nietzsche on the other hand sees music's Dionysian embodiment of the will to be essential to tragedy's energy because the suffering of nature and the will are inescapable. Nietzsche's criticism of Schopenhauer's arguments apply to the problem that "The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them!"¹⁵ Nussbaum says "Nietzsche's view is, then, not the simple inversion of Schopenhauer's" because he agrees with Schopenhauer's belief that an "honest gaze" discovers the world's "arbitrariness and absence of any intrinsic meaning" but he disagrees about the "consequences of this discovery for humanity's view of itself."¹⁶ Schopenhauer's human being "becomes nauseated with life, and with himself for having lived a delusion." While Nietzsche's human being, noticing the same things, "is filled with Dionysian joy and pride in his own artistry." Without intrinsic order, Nietzsche argues how wonderful it must be that man could invent "stories," "schemes," and "dances" through "the artistic possibilities of man" without "a designing god."¹⁷

The Loss of Myth in Music

Schopenhauer argues we understand music, the language of the Will, directly, and feel our fantasy stimulated to create an analogous example that will give shape and body to this spirit-world which speaks to us and which, although invisible, is so full of movement and life. Nietzsche argues that the Dionysian impulse is best realized in music, which has no clear boundaries, unstable and is non-representation. It is immersion in wholeness of nature, intoxication, non-rationality, and inhumanity. Its frenzied participation in life itself copies the will. As lyrics imitate music Nietzsche asks, "'As what does music appear in the mirror of imagery and concepts?' It appears as Will, understood in Schopenhauer's sense, which is to say, in opposition to the aesthetic, purely contemplative, will-less mood." Nietzsche says however that "music, by its essence cannot possibly be Will, because as such it would have to be banished entirely from the realm of art - for Will is that which is inherently un-aesthetic - but it appears as Will."¹⁸

Nietzsche's interpretation of the Apollonian is directly influenced by Schopenhauer's principium individuationis (principle of individuation). Man separates himself from undifferentiated immediacy of nature. The detached, rational representation of Apollo creates the myth of order in the world. Like sculpture has clear and definite boundaries and seeks to represent a reality that is perfectly stable, which is a myth. The eternal appearance of the Apollonian artistic potential emerges as music "stimulates us to contemplate symbolically Dionysiac universality, and it causes the symbolic image to emerge with the highest degree of significance." The lyric provides the illusion of Apollo's refinement, sobriety and emphasis on superficial appearance that gives birth to myth.¹⁹ Nietzsche says that "only the spirit of music allows us to understand why we feel joy at the destruction of the individual." He uses this argument to illustrate the eternal phenomenon of Dionysiac art, which expresses the omnipotent Will behind the principal individuationis, as it were, life going on eternally beyond all appearance and despite all destruction.

However, an imbalance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian causes mystic participation in art and myth to be lost.²⁰ When the Apollonian dream represses Dionysian realities, the harmony between the two wills is lost. The Apollonian illusion of a perfectible self leads spectators to become detached from the experience of the tragedy, causing it to become art instead of ritual. Greek tragedy reduced the prevalence of the chorus and the reflective nature of Euripides' human drama emerged. Socrates' emphasis on rationality eliminated the value of myth, suffering, and instincts to human knowledge. Unmediated imitation of nature no longer is possible when the deities represent two art-worlds that "differ in their deepest essence and highest goals."²¹The emptiness left behind in the absence of tragedy causes a turn to "tragic resignation and a need for art."²²

"For where art is concerned, that despotic logician now and then had the feeling of a gap, of an emptiness, of a partial reproach, of a duty he had perhaps neglected. As he explains to his friends in prison, one and the same dream apparition often came to him, always with the same words,  “Socrates, practise music!” 

-Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy

An Honest Gaze at Aesthetics and the Need for Art
Nussbaum says that Nietzsche argues "it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified."²³ Nietzsche argues that Dionysian music can exist on its own while it tolerates the Apollonian images and myths. Nietzsche says "lyric poetry is dependent on the spirit of music… music itself in its absolute sovereignty does not need the image and the concept, but merely endures them as accompaniments."²⁴ However, these images and myths are important in satisfying the "need for art" because "without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity" because "Myth alone saves all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollonian dream from their aimless wanderings…"²⁵

"The myth protects us from the music, just as, on the hand, it provides music with its highest freedom."²⁶ Nietzsche argues that the function of the tragic myth is to distract us from the music, so that the music can express its metaphysical essence with a freedom that would otherwise overpower us, not affect us.²⁷ The role of music, in Birth of Tragedy, is uniquely endowed with the capacity to frustrate both those who argue that Nietzsche values art for providing illusions and those who view Nietzsche as praising art for its capacity to disclose profound truths.²⁸ Music emerges, in the eyes of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, as the one direct way in which we can possess authentic experience of these universal realities; in a sense, music comes directly to us out of the fundamental realities of the universe. Tejera goes as far to argue that "it is only in the Dionysan mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysan state, that the basic fact of the Hellenic instinct finds expression, its will to 'life.'"²⁹

The Rise of Reason: Socratic Aestheticism
Classicism's nostalgia for "Greek serenity," Nietzsche argues, may exaggerate "the cheerfulness of the theoretical man."³⁰ He asserts that tragedy exhibits the Greeks' struggle with pessimism.  Dionysian forces give the Greek spectator a healthy, direct experience of human suffering and reality while the Apollonian provides the audience with the protective spirit-of-tragedy dream.  Nietzsche says these natural forces which manifest in "music and tragic myth are equally an expression of a people that are inseparable from each other." Nietzsche argues this shows how Greek tragedy addressed the human needs of Greek society and was not simply "naive" expression.³¹ Nietzsche reminds readers that the shared world of the two gods required a struggle between two wills even when they were balanced symbolically. While tragedy is an art that is completive of existence, "immersion in the sheer beauty of appearance" challenged by "pain and contradiction in life."³²

In tragedy's death, "what is tested, then, is the very Apollionian clarity that obstructs access to the Dionysian vision of the world and to the joy of beautiful appearances."³³ Benjamin Bennett argues that "tragedy is art intensified to the point where it must display and affirm precisely that truth which it is the nature of art, from primitive myth on, to conceal.³⁴ As the chorus gives way to dialogue, myth eventually gives way to Socratic aestheticism, recognizing the conflict between Apollonian and Dionysian. Martinus Nijhoff outlines the problem of the connection between the two forces:

Out of this synthesis, Nietzsche was quick to see, of the epic with the lyric, of the visual with the musical, of the chorus with the protagonist, was born the dramatic dithyramb which we call Greek Tragedy. And tragedy, Nietzsche has massively implied, is the art-form in which our painful consciousness of existential insignificance-- the ground of pessimism-- is overcome, reflectively and satisfactorily. In this art-form, man is projected as fusible with the primal, self-reflective artist-begetter of the world as a whole. Nietzsche is saying that it is of the essence of art both to get at what is primordial and be self-reflective while, also, reaffirming the significance of the human.³⁵

Socratic aestheticism finishes the imbalance between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces and collapses under pessimism because it can no longer affirmed by "metaphysical consolation." Nietzsche argues that the "metaphysical illusion is an instinct which belongs inseparably to science, and leads it to its limits time after time, at which point it mud transform itself into art; which is actually, given this mechanism, what it has been aiming at all along."³⁶

Conclusion: The Tragedy of Synthesis
The struggle between Apollo and Dionysus symbolically represents the needs that art fulfills for an audience, a connection to myth and a connection to truth. In the naïve spirit of Greek Tragedy, philosophers purport that this struggle was once a synthesis of the two ideals that energized a collective chorus. Nietzsche’s analysis of the Schopenhauer’s Will and its place in art, however, provokes the question of whether the Greeks were dealing with their own pessimism about truth, art, and the society that surrounded them.

¹ Nietzsche, Fredrich. Trans. Raymond Speirs, and Ed. Raymond Guess. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 45.

² Ibid., 24.

³ Ibid., 14.

⁴ Johnston, Ian C. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music: by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "Google Books." Last modified 2008. Accessed May 7, 2012. http://records.viu.ca/~

johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_
all.htm.

⁵ Nietzsche, 42.

⁶ Ibid., 41.

⁷ Ibid., 17.

⁸ Nussbaum, Martha C. "The Transfiguration of Intoxication: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus." Arion. 1. no. 2 (1998): 352.

⁹ Ibid., 77.

¹⁰ Nietzsche, 44.

¹¹ Nussbaum, 338.

¹² Nussbaum, 342.

¹³ Nussbaum, 343.

¹⁴ Nussbaum, 344.

¹⁵ Nietzsche, 75.

¹⁶ Nussbaum 351.

¹⁷ Nussbaum 351.

¹⁸ Nietzsche, 35.

¹⁹ Ibid., 79.

²⁰ Ibid., 70.

²¹ Nietzsche, 79.

²² Ibid., 75.

²³ Nussbaum, 351.

²⁴ Nietzsche, 23.

²⁵ Ibid., 135.

²⁶ Ibid., 130.

²⁷ Bennett, Benjamin. "Nietzsche's Idea of Myth: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics." PMLA. 94. no. 3 (1979): 426.

²⁸ Heckman, Peter. "The role of music in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy," The British journal of aesthetics. Volume 30. Issue 4. October 1990, 358.

²⁹ Tejera, Victorino. "What Nietzsche Loved about Socrates," Nietzsche and Greek Thought. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Dordrecht, Netherlands. 1987, 50.

³⁰ Nietzsche, 86.

³¹ Nietzsche, 138.

³²Tejera, 58.

³³ Rogiero, Miranda De Almedia, and Mark S. Roberts. "Socrates, Tragedy, Science." Nietzsche and Paradox. State University of New York Press: Albany, New York. 2006, 17.

³⁴ Bennett, 426.

³⁵ Tejera, 59.

³⁶ Nietzsche, 79.

Works Cited

Bennett, Benjamin. "Nietzsche's Idea of Myth: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics." PMLA. 94. no. 3 (1979): 420-433.

Nietzsche, Fredrich. Trans. Raymond Speirs, and ed. Raymond Guess. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Nussbaum, Martha C. "The Transfiguration of Intoxication: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus." Arion. 1. no. 2 (1998): 75-111.

Heckman, Peter. "The role of music in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy," The British journal of aesthetics. Volume 30. Issue 4. October 1990, 351-390.

Johnston, Ian C. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music: by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "Google Books." Last modified 2009. Accessed May 7, 2012. http://records.viu.ca/~

johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_

all.htm.

Rogiero, Miranda De Almedia, and Mark S. Roberts. "Socrates, Tragedy, Science." Nietzsche and Paradox. State University of New York Press: Albany, New York. 2006.

Tejera, Victorino. "What Nietzsche Loved about Socrates," Nietzsche and Greek Thought. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Dordrecht, Netherlands. 1987.

Clips from Final Semester

http://temple-news.com/2012/04/23/music-issue-artistic-cooperation-and-collaboration-on-girard-avenue/

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/component/flexicontent/item/37519-germantown-jazz&Itemid=1


http://sct.temple.edu/blogs/murl/2012/04/23/germantown-jazz-appreciation-month-is-year-round-for-germantown/

http://sct.temple.edu/blogs/murl/2012/04/01/west-oak-lane-police-districts-success-defies-city-murder-trend/

http://sct.temple.edu/blogs/murl/behind-the-news/germantown-victim-service-founder-helps-others-after-sons-murder/

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/component/flexicontent/item/36058-victim-services-founder

Super Schlegel Bros and Shakespeare: Artistic Unity, Uniqueness and Universality

Frederich Schlegel

Friederich Schlegel develops an aesthetic standard that claims "criticism is not to judge works by a general ideal, but is to search out the individual ideal of every work" ("Friedrich Shlegel," Literary Notebooks, 1733). He borrows from Herder's notions of historical/cultural uniqueness of individuals and Kant's assertion in Critique of Judgment of the impossibility of judging beauty according to an external rule.

Schlegel uses fragments, a characteristic figure of the Romantic movement, to reflect the "unity" that gives his philosophy "chaotic universality." He says "a fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog." (Athenaeums Fragment 206) Schlegel's fragments ask, "The simplest and most immediate questions, like Should we criticize Shakespeare's works as art or as nature?" (Athenaeums Fragment 121)

He looks like hedghog.

While Friedrich Schlegel's fragments do not form a systematic philosophy, his brother A.W. Schlegel answers some of these questions. He addresses Aristotle's claim that arts are mimetic and the classicist view that "art should imitate nature." Since art has to take from nature, Schlegel argues "art should form nature." (Behler 85) He argues that 'the clarity, the emphasis, the abundance, and manifoldness" in which the human mind mirrors itself in a world within a world makes it that "in art the human being is the norm of nature" (Behler 86) 

AW Schlegel

Friedrich Schlegel agrees with his brother's interpretation of imitation but argues that "Freedom of the poet" faces a challenge from "the pre-existent world of nature, society, and tradition (myth and history)" and thus "the poet is 'not entirely free', or free only in a particular way relative to his individual work of poetry." (87) Schlegel states that the "The privilege of nature is fullness and life; the privilege of art is unity." He says that in order for art to form to nature it must have unity that imitates the fullness of nature. 'Whoever denies the latter, whoever conceives of art only as a remembrance of the most beautiful nature, denies it all autonomous existence' (89)

While Schlegel regards Greek tragedy and epic poetry as "the peak in the natural culture of beautiful art," he considers it a "high prototype of artistic progression." Behler argues that Schlegel makes a "sharp distinction between a natural and an artificial, artistic period in the development of European art," attributing the natural to the classical period and the artificial to the modern which has become an infinite progression of self-reflection.

With artistic unity as a starting point, Schlegel argues a piece of art can begin to form rules internally. He may not entirely agree with the rules of Aristotle's Poetics but he can affirm the value to something like Shakespeare's rhyme, "the symmetrical repetition of similarity." (Critical Fragment 124) Striving for an aesthetic yet historical judgment like Herder, Schlegel argues that the objectives of ancient, classical and modern art should be assessed separately. Ancient art serves an objective; classical art exhibits character; modern art expresses the individual. All relate to universal values if given context. The "opposition, antithesis antinomy between classical and the modern worlds" should not be a failure of modernity. (Behler 102) Modern poetry's "lack of character" should be understood as "confusion the common feature of its mass, anarchy the essence of its history, and skepticism the result of its theory" at the time. (Behler 103)

Schlegel's Critical Fragment 200 says:
"Nay I'll ne'er believe a madman," says a very clever madman in Shakespeare "till I see his brains."
Schlegel continues "One might expect certain self-styled philosophers to fulfill this precondition of belief; and I would wager that one would find they had made papier-mâché out of Kant's writings." 
What Schlegel objects to is the mad repetition of past endeavors instead of embracing the "'ingenious originality', the 'interesting individuality', and the 'isolated egoism' of the modern artist." Instead of returning to a "past historical time, however perfect such an age may have been," moderns should seek unity in "new mythology" in artistically unified and "timely effort." (Behler 105) Schlegel argues this unity is key as "Philosophers still admire only Spinoza's consistency, just as the English only praise Shakespeare's truth." (Critical Fragment 306)

Tech-No-Logical: Why I Wish I Were A Cowboy

I want to die of dysentery on the Oregon Trail, not on a floppy disc but in the real world. At least in the old days I could pass away in peace with no fear of pictures of my feces-covered carcass getting spread all over Facebook.

No email, no blogs, no 24-hour hyperventilating mass media dissecting how I died and whose fault it is, just immortalization by the good ol’ Gutenberg Press. By the time the Pony Express would get back to Pennsyltucky, they’ll think I’d died saving babies from being eaten by bears or hipsters out in Portland. 

Ever since Edison invented the light bulb, we've been staring into screens. The invention that was supposed to help us see is making us go blind. That’s why we ain’t got no heroes today; we do nothing and when someone does do something we document every mistake they make. 


Shoot, Johnny Cash could make a song about killing a man in Reno and ain’t no police chased him for nothin’ but pills. Bank robbing and train thieving could be quite the thrill. Thanks a lot, security cameras. 

Instead, all kids do is steal music online and complain about delayed train times on Twitter. These twits don’t understand how great a cowboy I’d be. Sure, all I’d do is herd cattle all day but that’d be better than this mess of modern technology. Hulu? YouTube? The only words I’d need to know are “moo, moo.” Besides, the book’s always better than the movie.

Suck it, Spielberg!

We’re overloaded with so much information that we need to spoon-feed even the shortest of stories. If we need Lance Armstrong’s wristbands to symbolize us disgust for cancer, I suggest we get the training wheels for these technological tools. 

BibleWheel apparently like my metaphor too,
 though I'm not sure I follow theirs. 

Modern men always ruin good things. The bicycle was a perfect fix for the horse’s fuel and pollution problem but we mucked it up with cars. While we’re talking about transportation, I’d like to see the guy who invented the tricycle kick the guy who invented the Segway’s ass.

We’ve wasted so much time making things that were supposed to save us time. Instead, we’re slaves to the snooze button on our alarm clock, punching in time clocks when we should be punching Texas cattle. Now I ain't saying we need to go back to using morse code or nothing but I bet Alexander Graham Bell woulda thought twice about the telephone if he knew his momma was gonna talk to him on it for ten hours straight. We're so wired that when I fart I think my cell phone’s buzzing. 

Excuse me, Mom. I have to go. 
My followers are waiting for me to tweet about this.

Was the telegram was as annoying as these radioactive text messages? Did Honest Abe send annoying invitations to his generals about his latest poetry reading? 

Dear Ulysses,
Will you please come to the open mic in Shiloh this weekend?
I made organic hard-tack.
Thanks, 
Abey Baby

No. When Lincoln had something cool to say he showed up like a boss on a horse or steam engine to tell soldiers to shoot somebody for their country or God or some other abstract moral principle. Ain’t no simpler lesson than a Smith and Wesson.

Now let's turn these Confederates into confetti! Seriously, no one likes my poetic puns?

Simple, straightforward communication -- is that so tough today? The typewriter may be arduous but at least it made morons think before they told us about their breakfast or how much homework they have. Give me a home where the buffalo roam, not cell phones out of their network. None of this high-fangled Lil Wayne synthesizer nonsense mucking up all my air, just the sound of my own voice singing folk songs louder than anyone else. So as you stare into the screen pretending to forage through the faux-frontier, wondering how many hours of your life you've wasted. You should ask yourself, "Do you feel lucky? Well, computer junk?"